Some years ago I came across one of the hardest poems in the English language, and since I’ve been playing with the text-to-speech engine I decided to let the text-to-speech deal with the poem. It seemed to do very well and tought me how to pronounce some words I had never heard of as well.
The script runs best on Windows 8.1 and higher (powershell 4), but runs from Powershell 3.0 and up (as Invoke-Webrequest was added in that version of powershell).
It’s just a simple script that gets the installed voices, which you can select. It downloads and parses the poem from the page mentioned above. Then it loops through it line by line, writing the line to the screen and have text-to-speech say the line of text. I removed the speaking of the first and last line of text as I only wanted the poem itself to be read.
You can find the script here: ReadEnglishPoem.ps1
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